Belgium’s Ghent Design Museum, the biggest of its kind in the country, has reopened after a revamp led by British architects Carmody Groarke alongside local architects Atama. The extensive project has been one of expansion, consolidation, as well as heritage restoration by specialist studio Re-st, with a new circulatory loop carved through the museum’s existing historic buildings and the route completed with a new low-carbon entrance wing.
Explore the new Ghent Design Museum
The site of the new wing had lain derelict for years, hosting the museum toilets inside a huge toilet-roll sculpture – a tongue-in-cheek act of protest representing the space’s wasted potential. Today, that potential has been fulfilled with a different kind of waste: a building built with bricks made from Ghent’s municipal construction rubbish.
These lime-cured bricks, developed specially by Carmody Groarke and BC Materials with a grant from Circular Flanders, hold a third of the embodied carbon of a standard clay-fired Belgian brick. And, they’re just the start of a material journey that captures the museum’s ambition to show, as well as tell, how design can change the world.
The new wing is Belgium’s tallest public timber-structured building at five storeys, and after stepping through the 3D-printed recycled aluminium entrance gate designed by Unfold, you’ll discover design contributions from more than 30 local designers. These include modular furniture, toilets clad in bio-materials, an upcycled curtain by Chevalier-Masson, and a column of the museum’s own medieval, 18th-century, and 1990s demolition waste by Grond Studio.
When the site was excavated for the new lower ground level, the remains of a 12th-century house constructed from the timber of a boat were discovered. It turned out to be Ghent’s oldest-ever found residential structure. Architect Andy Groarke, co-founding director of Carmody Groarke, describes it as a ‘metaphor’ for the whole museum’s design approach that honours the ‘humility of deep time and resourcefulness'.
‘The building isn’t an endpoint. It's a scaffold for young Belgian designers, who are going to continually hack, redesign, interpret, misinterpret, use and misuse this building’
Andy Groarke, co-founding director of Carmody Groarke
He describes the architecture as a ‘postmodern counterfactual archaeological project’ – a museum rising from debris, history and the city itself, creating a ‘hyper-local vernacular’, where past material is reconfigured into the present. Museum architecture of the early 21st century has often been presented as a ‘frictionless object’ he says, which denies the ‘enjoyment and struggle of process’, and ‘the human qualities of improvisation and resourcefulness’.
Groarke delights in the idea of it becoming almost ‘deauthorised’ over time, gaining layers of character. 'The building isn’t an endpoint. It's a scaffold for young Belgian designers, who are going to continually hack, redesign, interpret, misinterpret, use and misuse this building. We see the architecture as a sort of infrastructure to enable things to happen and a test site for trial and error.'
The design approach responded to the vision of Katrien Laporte, museum director since 2013, to create a place of investigation, research and innovation, with an environmentally conscious mission. She recruited a panel of 40 elected local citizens with the intention of discovering what people really needed from a design museum today, to improve accessibility and civic relevance.
What became clear was that, as well as displaying as much as possible from the collection of approximately 24,000 objects, the design museum of today is a place that can evolve with its audience and become a space for open-ended congregation: one ‘where you're not forced to perform or consume and you can just be’, says Groarke.
In the new wing, functions are mainly social. There’s a spacious foyer for informal encounters and a new café with a courtyard garden designed by Bureau Bas Smets. The all-important new lift core for disabled access and timber staircase lead to the ‘Co-Lab’ or ‘Collective laboratory’ for experimental workshops and further up to the high-ceilinged ‘Loft’, another gathering place with its huge window to the city.
In an ‘overmediated’ society where we’re often distanced from experience by technology, for Groarke, today’s design museum is a ‘touchpoint for the physical world and the social world’, where ‘people can come together to make sense of their time and place’. Both anchored in the layers of the historic city and ready to set sail into the rest of the century, Ghent Design Museum is a new vessel, laboratory and ‘third space’ for the city.